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Op-ed

So, what’s a knowledge engine anyway?

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By Andreas Kolbe
Wikipedia.org re-imagined
Ex-WMF board member James Heilman

The removal of James Heilman (Doc James) from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has brought the issue of the “knowledge engine”, i.e. the work of the WMF’s "Discovery" department, into focus for the volunteer community.

Ever since his dismissal, Heilman has maintained that disagreements about appropriate transparency related to the Discovery, or "Knowledge Engine", project, funded by a restricted grant from the Knight Foundation, were a key factor in the events that led to his removal. Jimmy Wales has referred to these claims as "utter fucking bullshit".

But what is "discovery" and the knowledge engine all about? This is an attempt to make sense of the patchy information that the Wikimedia Foundation has provided to the volunteer community and the public to date, and to extract some of the underlying ideas related to the project.

A statement of regret

Related articles
Knowledge Engine

A few days ago, Lila Tretikov posted a statement titled "Some background on the Knowledge Engine grant" on her talk page on Meta-Wiki. This is worth reading in full; parts of it are excerpted in what follows below. She begins by acknowledging that she should have communicated with the volunteer community sooner.

This kind of communication is potentially a good start to mend fences with the community, and redress some of the things that went wrong with how and when this project was started and communicated.

When did this project start?

A slide show on Discovery, published last November

In her statement, Lila Tretikov recalls her thoughts around the knowledge engine in June 2015. But to locate the actual beginning of this project, we have to look back a little further than that.

"Search & Discovery" first appeared as a department on the Wikimedia Foundation Staff & Contractors template on 30 April 2015. There would have been no point in creating a well-staffed, well-funded Search & Discovery department in April 2015 if the WMF leadership had had no practical idea of what this team was going to be working on.

Risker was perhaps the first to raise public questions about the project, which remained unanswered. Reviewing the WMF's draft 2015–2016 Annual Plan in her capacity as a member of the volunteer-staffed Funds Dissemination Committee in May 2015, she said on Meta:

This is in line with what James Heilman said in his Signpost op-ed dated January 13, 2016, describing the ideas around Search & Discovery as having been developed before the April to June 2015 quarter:

By September 2015 – more than four months before the WMF publicly announced the grant to the community and the world at large on January 6, 2016 – the Knight Foundation had clearly made a decision to support a WMF knowledge engine project. A still extant page on the Knight Foundation website mentions a grant for $250,000, with a grant period running from 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2016, funding work –

James Heilman's dating of the project matches the facts. And Risker's questions, posed in May 2015, indicate that the volunteer community – including the FDC – had been out of the loop well before June 2015.

Has the Foundation's grant transparency policy changed?

Sue Gardner, the former Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director

Lila Tretikov addresses another question in her statement:

This seems to differ from her predecessor Sue Gardner's statement of WMF policy in October 2011. In this statement, Gardner said,

Sue Gardner said publishing grant applications is standard policy unless the donor objects. Lila Tretikov says it is standard policy not to publish grant applications, unless "requested and agreed to by donors."

This seems like a subtle move away from the transparency which the WMF has traditionally emphasised as one of its core values.

"Actions speak volumes"

Volunteers have called for weeks for the Knight Foundation grant application and grant letter to be published. A month ago, for example, MLauba addressed Jimmy Wales on his talk page, responding to statements by Wales that James Heilman's narrative was "misdirection", a "trap", "not true" and that he – Wales – was "a much stronger advocate of transparency than James":

Wales replied,

This sounded promising. Yet nothing happened on that front for the best part of a month, until Lila Tretikov's recent statement on her Meta talk page. In the relatively brief discussion that has ensued there to date, James Heilman has reiterated his call for the grant application to be published:

Yet the responses posted by Jimmy Wales and fellow Board member Denny Vrandečić (Denny) on that page are anything but encouraging. The WMF board seems remarkably reluctant to publish both the grant application and the grant letter for community review.

Partial information

What Lila Tretikov has now provided on her Meta talk page is a list of expected outcomes of the Knight Foundation grant, deliverable at the conclusion of the first stage. The mention of a first stage raises the obvious question of how many stages are envisaged, and what the expected deliverables for the other stages are.

Liam Wyatt (Wittylama) mentions in his most recent blog post that the WMF's original grant application seems to have been for a much larger amount than the relatively modest $250,000 the Knight Foundation has actually committed to. As others have pointed out, $250,000 is an amount the Wikimedia Foundation can raise and has raised in a few hours on a December afternoon. Liam Wyatt's assertion that the original application was for a much larger amount seems at least plausible.

Details of the grand vision for this multi-stage project, couched in approachable language understandable by anyone, is still lacking. Publication of the grant application would help volunteers and the public understand the WMF leadership's thinking, and the long-term goals of the Discovery project.

"Are you building a new search engine?"

A search engine for open content on the Internet, accessing a mix of Wikimedia content and content from other sources, with output vectors including OEM products such as the Amazon Kindle

Some related information is available in a Discovery Year 0–1–2 presentation on MediaWiki – but when originally delivered, its slides would have been accompanied by spoken commentary. As it is, the slides are written in such a shorthand and jargon-laden style that it seems likely few general readers will be able to follow the content, and fill in the gaps.

What's described on page 9 of that document however is clearly some form of search engine for open content on the Internet.

This is also reflected in the original Knight Foundation announcement from September 2015:

Of course, this is not the first time the idea of a search engine has been raised in the Wikimedia universe. Those with long memories will recall Wikia Search, a short-lived free and open-source Web search engine launched by Jimmy Wales' for-profit wiki-hosting company Wikia in 2008.

Wikia Search was conceived as a competitor to the established search engines. It was not a success, closing down in 2009 after failing to attract an audience.

That there have been questions among WMF staff and volunteers whether the WMF is engaged in building a search engine is borne out by a corresponding section in the Discovery FAQ on MediaWiki:

At the same time, the Discovery FAQ on MediaWiki asks,

Wikipedia.org remodelled
This sounds like an idea to re-purpose Wikipedia.org, having it function as a search engine for open content – including but not limited to all Wikimedia projects. And indeed, a slide on "Conceptual directions for Discovery" shows versions of a Wikipedia.org page that bear more than a passing resemblance to Google's start page, being dominated by a Wikipedia wordmark and an empty search box.

It is perhaps significant that Wikipedia is now one of the search engine options for the search box in Firefox, alongside Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others.

Deliverables

Assessing whether users would "go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia" is also one of the key questions the work funded by the Knight Foundation is expected to answer.

The sections of the Knight Foundation grant documentation that Lila Tretikov has quoted on her Meta talk page read as follows:

Embedding Wikipedia in OEMs and other carriers

The Amazon Kindle includes a factory-installed Wikipedia look-up function

Responding to a question about the mention of Original Equipment Manufacturers in the above grant excerpt, Lila Tretikov has indicated on her talk page in Meta that the WMF is

There is no reason to assume that this type of arrangement will be restricted to mobile phones. Even today, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader for example has a Wikipedia look-up function pre-installed, as does the Amazon Echo, a household infotainment assistant that like Apple's Siri responds to voice commands.

One problem the Foundation appears to want to address is that Search often returns "zero results" – i.e. cases where a user query is not mapped to a Wikipedia article.

Kindle users trying to look up a word in a book they're reading will be familiar with this problem. To give an example, the other day I was faced with the term "unentailed" in a Victorian short story. Neither of the Kindle's built-in dictionaries knew the term. Querying Wikipedia on the Kindle yielded the disappointing message: "No Wikipedia results were found for your selection", along with an option to "open Wikipedia". When I did so, I found many Wikipedia articles containing the term, but only one was useful in helping me understand the word: Fee tail.

A better search function might have presented me with that article to begin with. Similarly, I might not have had a zero results message if the Wikipedia search function extended to other Wikimedia projects. Instead, my Kindle might have pointed me to the Wiktionary entry for the word unentailed.

Search improvements like this would make locating information more convenient for Kindle users. Amazon would arguably profit from having a more desirable product.

Machine-generated content

The ongoing community consultation on Meta suggests that one possible approach the Wikimedia Foundation might take would be to

More than half of all language versions of Wikipedia suffer from a long-term dearth or indeed complete lack of human volunteer editors. Wikidata content could be used to have machines generate simple articles "on the fly", using a store of simple sentence templates that Wikidata values are then plugged into. This, too, would reduce the number of times users' searches come up empty.

Public curation of relevance

A key concern for search engines is which information to "surface" in response to a query, i.e. identifying which information is most "relevant" to a user query. (In the above example, for instance, this might have been the Wiktionary entry for the word "unentailed", or the Wikipedia article for "fee tail".)

Here, too, Wikidata and Discovery are apparently envisaged to play a key role in future. A little-visited Discovery RfC draft subpage on MediaWiki speaks of "public curation of relevance":

There are obvious alarm bells attached to that last caveat. Increasing or diminishing the visibility of information to search engine users is what search engine optimisation is all about. Public curation of relevance provides a mechanism that seems tailor-made for that purpose – hence the caveat.

Focus on open content

Google includes content from open sources on its search engine results pages
If Wikipedia.org is to become a search engine, all the information available to date suggests that it will be a search engine specialising in open content.

As discussed in a previous Signpost op-ed, search engines are increasingly re-publishing open content deemed relevant to users' queries on their own sites.

The purpose of a search engine used to be to provide the user with a directory of relevant links. This purpose has shifted: search engines are morphing into answer engines that aim to provide the answers to users' questions directly, obviating users' need to click through to any other site. This supports the search engines' business model: search engines derive a significant part of their income from the ads displayed on search engine results pages. Making sure that users stay on these pages and do not click through to other sites (including Wikipedia) improves the search engines' bottom line.

APIs

The Knight FAQ on MediaWiki emphasises the importance of APIs (application programming interfaces):

The availability of a Wikipedia knowledge engine would not just benefit users of Wikimedia sites. There are clear overlaps with commercial search engines. Google itself for example, when introducing the Knowledge Graph to the public, referred to it as a "knowledge engine". As mentioned in that publicity video, a key concern when deciding what content to show in response to a query is what other users have judged relevant to their query.

Seen from the viewpoint of potential re-users like Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines, public curation of relevance, as mentioned above, could help them identify free information sources that human users are likely to find useful.

Thus the API might deliver volunteer-derived data that those answer engines can use to optimise their product – for example through optimised page ranking for open content pages, or direct inclusion of user-preferred free content in answer boxes, knowledge panels and the like.

Volunteer
Taking a very negative view, bearing in mind search engines' soaring and astronomical profits from advertising, one might argue that such an arrangement would turn volunteers into unpaid hamsters driving the spinning cogs in the Knowledge Graph, Bing's Snapshot etc., in endless pursuit of the dangling carrot that they can try to affect how readily something is "surfaced" in search engines – and occasionally succeed in doing so, for better or worse.

Coexistence?

Given the information presently available, it seems reasonable to assume that the long-term goal of the Discovery project, including public curation of relevance, is to build a search engine for free information sources on the Internet, and for capturing and defining patterns of human user interaction with such content.

The failed Wikia Search project was designed to compete against Google. Not least because of this failure, it seems unlikely to me that the present Discovery project pursues similar long-term ambitions.

It simply doesn't seem very plausible that the Discovery project could or could even be intended to compete against the likes of Google, Bing and Yandex, given that –

  1. Wikipedia's open-source nature and APIs would make whatever insights and data the Discovery project generates available to these competitors, who are already well established. Any competitive advantage these data might deliver to a WMF search engine would be instantly neutralised by the fact that its putative competitors would have access to them too.
  2. Google, Microsoft and Yandex are actually supporting Wikidata. It seems unlikely that they would be funding a competitor.
  3. Wikidata comes with a no-attribution CC-0 licence, which serves re-users' interests, but undermines the publicly professed rationale of reaching users so as to convert them into editors.

At most, the Wikimedia Foundation board appears to entertain the idea of charging re-users for API use. In other words, the work done by volunteers might be of sufficient economic value to re-users to open up another source of income for the Foundation.

The times, they are a-changing

Lila Tretikov, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director

I recall listening to Lila Tretikov's "Facing the Now" speech at Wikimania 2014, in which she stressed that Wikipedia, while apparently at the peak of its success at the time, was in danger of being left behind by technology developments, and would need to adapt to remain relevant. I wondered at the time what she was driving at, but it seems to become clearer now.

As people's infotainment needs and usage patterns move away from desktop computers to mobile phones, voice-controlled electronic assistants and other products that will be as commonplace in ten or twenty years' time as they are unimagined by most of us today, many of the people who used to visit Wikipedia pages may find their information needs more conveniently satisfied elsewhere than on the pages of an encyclopedia.

The march of technological progress can't be halted. And indeed, many of us find that progress inherently exciting. The idea of positioning the Wikimedia community as the central engine driving many different types of information products and services – or at least a major component of such an engine – is likely to appeal to many Wikimedians. It would certainly keep Wikimedia relevant.

And one might ask, in the absence of scalable alternatives, is there really a better process for generating and curating such content today? Google has long argued that volunteers outperform paid contributors when it comes to such work.

Yet there is also much to be disturbed about. Omnipresent snippets, delivered to a potential audience of billions, amplify the risk of manipulation, creating an information infrastructure that seems more vulnerable to activist influence, or indeed Gleichschaltung, than conventional media. It has been established that even today, search engines would have the power to sway elections if they put their mind to it.

To the extent that volunteer labour helps corporations like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft make billion-dollar profits, the potential labour patterns described here involve obvious and profound social and economic injustices. On Jimmy Wales' talk page, volunteers have begun to wonder whether they need to unionise to have any influence on the future of their movement.

The increasing importance of machine-generated and machine-read content in efforts to serve global information demand may be anathema to many Wikimedians committed to the idea of an encyclopedia written by people, for people.

And there are other concerns: to what extent do Silicon Valley-facing developments like those described here, efforts to build a technologically slicker product and achieve greater market penetration, detract from other efforts that volunteers might consider more relevant to the core goal of writing an encyclopedia? Making Kindle search functions more easy and satisfying to use is all well and good, but what should the relative priority of such efforts be?

James Heilman is a Wikipedian who has gained much acclaim for his efforts to make Wikipedia's medical content truly reliable. Bringing a Wikipedia article to a quality level that was good enough to make it eligible for inclusion in a peer-reviewed journal (see previous Signpost coverage) – the first Wikipedia article to qualify as a reliable source under Wikipedia's own rules – was a milestone in Wikipedia history, though one the Foundation made no great effort to publicise at the time.

In an alternative universe, the Wikimedia Foundation might put equal focus on supporting and expanding such efforts, believing that a quality product will always have a readership. Ubiquity is not the same as quality; Gresham's law could easily be applied to the world of information as well.

Conclusion

As stated above, this op-ed is my attempt to make sense of the patchy information that has been made public about Discovery, or the Knowledge Engine. I will be grateful to have my interpretations and conclusions confirmed or corrected as appropriate by WMF personnel – and, I am sure, so will the volunteer community.

But most importantly, there are matters here that the community should make an input to. The ongoing community consultation on strategy touches on many of the issues discussed here. It will close on February 15, 2016.

There is also an ongoing issue of transparency. The WMF board should make the Knight Foundation grant application and grant letter public, in line with WMF policy as stated by Sue Gardner in the past. If for some reason the Knight Foundation objects, that should be openly stated and an explanation provided.

Information sources on Discovery

For another perspective on these developments, see Liam Wyatt's blog post Strategy and controversy, part 2.

Update: The grant agreement has since been published, and some further documents have been leaked to the Signpost. See Signpost coverage.

Andreas Kolbe has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2006. He is a member of the Signpost's editorial board. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.

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Comments

  • This is yet another piece of work that WMF have invested in that is pretty much news to me. Time and again, project after project, we see the WMF taking some unilateral action that affects, or has the potential to affect, enwiki without this community being consulted. But this is telling:
    "However, I was too afraid of engaging the community early on.
    Why do you think that was?"
The enwiki community seems, in my view, to have become incredibly conservative when it comes to embracing new ideas, and often expresses that conservatism in bitey ways that often involve ganging up on WMF staff and verge on incivility. It's little wonder the WMF are afraid to engage with the community at the inception of these projects; we, the enwiki community, make it incredibly hard for them, especially when a concept isn't yet fully formed (which is exactly when it's most important that the engagement takes place).
I'm not making excuses for the WMF's lack of engagement with the community over projects like this, Gather, and others. But I do appreciate that engaging with us lot has become a daunting task and if we want WMF to engage more, we as a community need to be a bit more receptive to new ideas and welcome that engagement when it comes. WaggersTALK 09:45, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some like the Community Tech team[1] however do an excellent job intereacting with the wider movement. Our communities realize that we have issues and have many ideas regarding how to improve things. The EN community does not wish to stay exactly the same but contains the knowledge of what has been tried previously and some of the reasons why other things may not have succeeded. Other communities contain similar knowledge basis. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:44, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Lila Tretikov asking "Why do you think that was?" is a bit 'rich' as in 'poor', given that everybody is shoutingly asking: "why did you think that?". -DePiep (talk) 00:02, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
agree--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:39, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • I sincerely applaud that you are defending Lila Tretikov, Waggers. It is easy to be too harsh in criticizing both her & the Foundation for their recent actions. However, I must point out that it is the paid job of the CEO or ED of a corporate body to do hard things. Going to the volunteer communities to sell the Knowledge Engine, on a scale of 1 to 10, is about a 5: while there will be a lot of volunteers who will criticize it properly for not being what the majority considers a top priority, there are also a lot of volunteers who could be convinced to let her do it -- if she made the effort to reach out. And if she is skittish about talking to the community about something that is a challenge -- but not a serious one -- how is she going to handle a real challenge? Standing up to Jimmy Wales when he is wrong about something is easily a 9. (And yes, Wales has been known to be wrong. More than once.) If she admits that she can't do hard tasks, then maybe she should find somewhere else to earn her paycheck. -- llywrch (talk) 06:25, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • On the point about James Heilman shepherding the first Wikipedia article through peer review in an academic journal, I agree, it's a very significant milestone.
Those interested in the idea of Wikipedia publishing reliable versions of our articles should also be aware of Daniel Mietchen's achievements. Among his many roles, Daniel is the editor of PLOS Computational Biology's "Topic Pages", where topics not covered (or just stubs) on en. Wikipedia are written up as articles, submitted to the journal for peer review and published under a Wikipedia-compatible license, like "Inferring Horizontal Gene Transfer". The peer-reviewed version is then pasted into Wikipedia with attribution like this: Inferring horizontal gene transfer. So, Daniel's model is the reverse of James's - Daniel's begins with a journal article that is then republished in Wikipedia, James's with a Wikipedia article that is then republished in a journal. But both have the same very valuable result: a version of the article hosted on Wikipedia that is a Wikipedia:Reliable source.
All articles like these, that have a version that meets en.Wikipedia's reliable sources guideline, should be celebrated, and should have a prominent badge at the top, linking the reader to the peer-reviewed version (either off-wiki, or in the article's revision history). --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 13:13, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Signpost advised "This (Lila Tretikov post about Knowledge Engine) is worth reading in full". I took it.
I heartily agree that when in June 2015 one thinks "I had begun visualizing open knowledge existing in the shape of a universe" (the shape of a universe?!), with a "rocket": That is not suitable for an open discussion. Instead, I say, someone should call a doctor at that point. (It does serve great as a claim for 'I invented', though). Surprisingly, without being tested in any way, that universe + rocket visualisation already had materialised in a serious multi-staged project funding. "This work is fundamental and core to our longterm progress" says Jimbo Wales. This all written in hindsight.
Then, enters the Doctor we asked for! (James Heilman, to be precise). Itchingly, Lila Tretikov stops her (post-time) description of her thinking/acting process right when James entered the Board. Six months not thinking/acting, James leaves the Board, and uppa: thinking/acting again.
In short: the personal-only talk (Jimmy Wales supports) is missing six months. Exactly those with & about James Heilman. What a lousy piece. I feel abused. -DePiep (talk) 00:38, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think there is an argument of "you can't compete with google or other corporations", but open source field has many successful examples before us. I mean firefox vs. IE, Linux vs. Windows... I just don't understand why people get so pessimistic and insist to have the grant to use elsewhere... --Liang (WMTW) (talk) 11:03, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
We can definitely can compete with Google, look at Google Knol. We just cannot compete with Google using the same methods as Google (ie we cannot compete with Google without the direct and sometimes messy involvement of all of us) Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:32, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have to admit, even having followed this issue intently for a while, I've been having an exceedingly difficult time deciding--once we put the aggravating transparency issues, which are a concern unto themselves, to the side--if this is a matter we should all be deeply concerned about or just a great deal of unnecessary hand-wringing. But I will say this much: what worries me most is the suggestion that there is serious investigation of whether or not to alter the core function of the Wikipedia.org domain. The Knowledge Engine in itself is an interesting concept, assuming the reading above is essentially accurate--I certainly take a similar view away from the slides and the other scant communicated details. But where I can see it as a potentially powerful tool in the Wikimedia hierarchy, occupying a role a parallel to (and somewhat between) Wikipedia and Wikidata, the notion that it might be merged with (some might even say, supplant) the current project that sits in that space today, with profound implications for the encyclopedia, its community of contributors and the movement at large is a disorienting enough idea that there's no way even initial investigation into the technical mechanics should have been explored before vetting the general concept with the community.
I'm usually a staunch defender of the WMF's pereogative on these sorts of matters, and their need to lead an innovate to some degree. But I'm starting to be won over by the critics here; there seems to be fundamental change in the outlook of the foundation taking place, and I really hope some efforts can be made fast to arrest the growing gulf between it and the community of volunteers. Jimbo, as always, seems to be the man to take the lead here; I for one have not been disabused of the notion that he is genuinely dedicated to transparency and to avoiding anything that even resembles a commercialized model for WMF projects, but at present, not nearly enough is being done to get us all on to the same page as to how we further adapt the project without jettisoning some of the fundamental concepts that have gotten us where we are today. I'm a little unnerved about where this might all go. Snow let's rap 21:48, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a brand new contributor, as in, I have just created this account today. I can tell you guys for a fact that the reason I have not contributed thus far is because I don't agree or enjoy the fact that all this information is being collected from me. I know it's something that's agreed to upon choosing to use the site. I am one of the few determined dorks that still reads the entire pricy policy and EULA for all the products that I use. (although, you ought to really make those a little bit easier to understand, no one appreciates purposeful lawyer jargon) I'm aware of what's happening, (at least now I am) It's still a bit uncomfortable to take in. Here's the thing, at first I don't know if it was my imagination or what, but it felt like these articles changed so rapidly, or the content was so efficiently user data generated, the site had a mind of it's own. If I come on a site to do research and to learn something new, I want to do just that. I personally want to put the work into it. I don't what the site itself trying to over convenience my search because then I might miss out on stumbling upon something else that's extra fascinating. When I do come on to wikipedia, I no longer use is as a source of reference because it is inherently distracting I can't even stay on the same topic for more than 5 minutes without it demonstrating 6 degrees of separation in terms of content. I use it to keep myself occupied, but I don't use it as a stable trusted resource. I think it's getting out of hand. What's even crazier to me is how finely pinpointed data driven ads have become now too not just in the realm of wikipedia. I swear on my life, when data triggered capabilities were becoming newly implemented, I thought someone was playing a cruel joke on me my phone would be so creepily specific. I was sure when of my more intelligent friends was getting the better half of me. Either that, or my phone computer and other devices had suddenly become sentient. All of these new ideas seem backed by the nobel cause never ending pursuit of knowledge. I'm completely for that! But knowledge doesn't come from my computer or tablet. It doesn't come from what I click on my tablet, or what I've been recorded saying or doing. Sure, you can breach my privacy and learn 'stuff' about me. But stuff and knowledge isn't the same guys. Computers will always lack the most wonderful parts of the living, human, cognitive process. Tech will always lack the flaws, the creativity, the vulnerability, the emotion. It just simply doesn't translate right and never will, we're meant to learn form each other. The internet was absolute wonderful for bringing us closer than ever as a global society, but when you let the machines do all of the work, they just butt in and further the widen.

What DID inspire me to contribute to the post today specifically, was the (only slightly) larger presence of clear concise information you all have presented about your ideas, where the sites going, etc. I've probably found a couple dozen other open dialogs around here that are similar, but everyone sure likes to tiptoe around the issue. I, like many others, truly appreciate honesty and transparency. I think that even though this can be a tough and scary conversation, that people will form their negative or positive opinions regardless once they finally figure it out. And I feel that you're a big enough enough company that you'll do what you want anyway. Theres no reason to hide or dodge it. It's more respectful to engage your users and allow them to more easily know your ambitions and intentions as a company. If people are anything like me, they'll dig and find out what they need to know anyway.

I just have one more thing to say, although my response today may have come off a bit hypercritical, I want to say don't think the sites ambitions are a bad thing. I think that your actions are justified. I still don't necessarily agree with the concept personally, but I still always like maintain an open mind. I would love to hear some more from you guys! How does the grant work, anyhow? I would really love some more information on that too. I apologize for the length, I had so much to say. Hopefully this at least gives you some valuable insight.

W00ptangs (talk) 16:04, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What we could do with search and discovery

One of the causes of tension between the WMF and the community is that instead of investing in the IT changes we think we want the WMF invests in software that they think we want. Hence the despair of anyone like myself who has tried to make suggestions through phabricator and bugzilla. There are a bunch of search related software investments that I think the community would welcome:

  1. The Geograph cracked locality years ago. Their site includes tabs for things like "more images nearby", it would be great if Wikimedia Commons, WikiTravel and yes maybe even Wikipedia had this at least as an option.
  2. I talked recently to some Georgian wikipedians who have problems with the way search engines don't include their version of Wikipedia. I think they need something like redirects to articles written in Georgian for people typing Georgian terms with Latin or Cyrillic alphabets; But I'm sure whatever their IT needs some direct dialogue with the WMF and some programmer time would be welcome.
  3. I've tried to interest the WMF in some presentations I've attended here in the UK on image recognition software. Imagine how much more effective categorisation would be on Commons if you could search for images that look like the one in front of you.
  4. Along with users Leutha and Rich Farmbrough I have been working on image adding both as a new newbie activity and to digest the vast amount of imagery coming from programs such as GLAM. Search and discovery could make a huge difference here.

If the Knowledge Engine is merely a concept in search of some concrete suggestions then I'd like to offer those four as a starter for things that search and discovery could do. If however there are some concrete but not yet disclosed suggestions as to what the Knowledge engine will mean then the sooner they are revealed the less additional anger in the community. ϢereSpielChequers 16:32, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jimbo Wales should clean up his language

I hope that was just a conversation which was intended to be private (but nothing on Wikipedia really is) and not an official statement.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:56, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Grant Paperwork

Grant paperwork is only relevant if this is a WMF initiated project. To me it sounds like it is an externally initiated project, which can only be realized in a WMF context. I surmise therefore that some external entities has approached the WMF with this project and the money to pay for it. In which case grant paperwork is not relevant. Jan Pedersen (talk) 14:27, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Per the paperwork below this was a WMF initiated project. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:43, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The grant agreement has now been published

See https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=File:Knowledge_engine_grant_agreement.pdf

Mailing list announcement: [2] --Andreas JN466 21:02, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The Signpost needs your help putting together the next issue.
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